General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: The USSC does not say that "money is speech" [View all]The Velveteen Ocelot
(131,159 posts)corporations were deemed to be legal "persons" for certain business purposes, particularly litigation. That is, a corporation can sue and be sued as if it were a natural human. If it couldn't, it would be pretty impossible for corporations to be sued, and we need to be able to do that. And corporations regularly sue each other, for good reasons and bad (in fact, the vast majority of cases filed in the federal system are instances of commercial litigation). The problem is that this corporate "personhood," which is necessary in some ways to conduct business, got all spun out of shape, resulting in the notion that a corporation has all of the same constitutional rights as an actual human. Obviously the humans who own and operate the corporation have constitutional rights, but how can you transfer those rights to the inchoate and abstract corporation, without disregarding the corporation's separate entity which is what allows the individual owners to insulate themselves from the corporation's debts and liabilities? I've never understood that.
You say corporations formed to disseminate speech have the right to free speech. I would argue that the individuals who formed the corporation have the right to free speech, but the corporation is merely the abstract entity organized to do so more efficiently, with no separate constitutional rights of its own. And what about those corporations that were just formed to do business of some kind, like the corporations owned by the Koch brothers? If those corporations weren't "formed to disseminate speech" in the first place, why would they have the right to free speech, independent from their human owners' rights?